Cloud age yet?

(This blog is written thousand meter above the ground, on my way back to Copenhagen.)

I still remember I met people from big corporations who told me that they were using Access as database for some nasty legacy reasons. It is scary, but not surprising such legacies are very very close to us in everywhere.

Last month, I said something like "Cloud age" is here already. Wonder about next hype or buzz? It turned out to be the big data. After some reading on Hadoop and Cassandra, I'm thinking again. Really? Are we there (Cloud age) yet? Or we just got started?

I remember the wow and aha feeling when I first read book "The Big Switch" for 4 years ago. Yet, we are not "there" by looking at big picture. In the past four or five decades, computer changed a couple generations. We are now facing a another new "revolution age" of Information Technologies. We built hardware and software to resolve complicated problem, we also made the problem much more complicated than before. Take financial derivatives as an example.

Back to the topic again, where are we now in the time line of IT age? One of the buzz word of the year is "Transformation". It means we have to do something with our current IT environment to meet rapid development, to be more efficient, to become better.

If above the cloud is a fully automated IT services you can imagine, with minimum frictions and overhead of staffs. On the ground is our current world of IT. I believe cloud is something in middle that we need to reset our mindset and transform us from transitional IT to something simpler. It is cloudy challenging, but it will be a journey everyone must take...